Book review: Plot structure keeps intrigue rolling along

Book review: Plot structure keeps intrigue rolling along

It’s a common sentiment that the best friends are old friends. But it’s also the terrible flaw in the long comradeship among four 30-something pals out for a celebration at a music festival in London, England.

It’s a common sentiment that the best friends are old friends. But it’s also the terrible flaw in the long comradeship among four 30-something pals out for a celebration at a music festival in London, England.

Anna, Cassie, Bo and Dex found each other back in university, and despite changes in each of their lives in the past 15 years, they’ve maintained the sort of powerful, taken-for-granted bonds that they feel no need to question or analyze.

The Guilty Party by Mel McGrath (HQ HarperCollins, $23.99)

Anna and Bo were once a couple, as were Cassie and Dex. Anna has since married and had a child, and the womanizing Bo has become rich as a hook-up app developer. Dex, who eventually came out as gay, is married to a wealthy older man with a terminal illness. Only Cassie is a bit stuck, still living in a shared flat doing ordinary and tedious work.

But it’s important to each of them to sustain their group outside other attachments, which is what sends them to a drunken, brawling music festival to mark Cassie’s 32nd birthday.

What happens there forms the core of The Guilty Party by Brit Mel McGrath, who writes other crime fiction as MJ McGrath, and as Melanie McGrath produced the memoir Silvertown.

In the crowded chaos of the festival’s dwindling moments, the four drift in and out of each other’s company. But all four, from various vantage points, witness the apparent rape of a woman in an alley. And not one of them makes a move to stop the attack, or then to report it.

Nor, a few weeks later when they get together for a weekend holiday, does anyone besides Cassie want to talk about what they each saw and what they might still do about it. She may be haunted by their inaction, but each of them has a reason — and perhaps even a fleeting connection to the raped woman — for avoiding the matter.

The Guilty Party’s chief virtue lies in a shrewd structure that alternates between the night of the music festival and the individual experiences there of each group member, and the subsequent getaway weekend in which assorted tensions and secrets unfold.

Both the not-quite-happily married Dex and the app developer Bo have very active, even promiscuous sex lives. The largely bored-with-marriage-and-motherhood Anna, who sustains her old craving for Bo, is fierce about protecting both him and the group’s solidarity.

And Cassie, who has felt for years that the group and its members are about all that give her humdrum life meaning and glamour, is increasingly uneasy and guilty about the woman in the alley, who is revealed to have been not only raped but killed the night they all failed to intervene.

The identity and fate of the young woman is only one of the crimes and mysteries eventually revealed in The Guilty Party.

As the chronology of the music festival night moves backward for each of the characters, gradually and enticingly unveiling each person’s events and motivations, the chronology of the getaway weekend moves forward, sometimes just an hour or two at a time, until some terrible secrets — the real mysteries — are laid bare.

The characters in The Guilty Party, however oddly attached to each other, aren’t necessarily individually gripping, and the writing itself is sometimes pedestrian. But the fast-dancing backward-and-forward structures are intriguing and clever enough to keep the suspense rolling, and to make the outcome a cruel but satisfying surprise.